A Market Journal: From 0 to Millions

Day 2 Guess: 1,777,666,000

1.5 bill (guess 1) 1.99 bill (guess 2)

927,386,415.

Good luck and good tips!

100 billion!!!

What… it had to be said.

I'll just double my Day 1 prediction and go with 880 million as a second guess.

I'm sure I'll be Price is Right-ed soon enough heh.

Awesome thread, Fury

this thread should be referenced whenever someone starts complaining that they can't make the money for set IO's

put me down for 1,078,000,000

Day 2 - Starting inf: 21,087,948, Ending Inf: 227,963,856

Well I thought I had 250M in the bag, but those last couple of IOs sat for the last five hours. Sometimes that's how it goes. Overall, it was a good day and I made well over 200M influence.

As you've noticed if you've been keeping up with this thread, I've been able to sneak away from work on three different occasions for about 10 to 15 minutes at a time. That allowed me enough time to collect earnings, bid on new recipes and quickly craft items for sale. Normally, on most week days, I wouldn't bother about trying to get in game so aggressively, but weekends are really when you can absolutely make the most influence. You can count on your inventory completely turning over (selling out) maybe once or twice on a weekday but several times daily on an active weekend day. If you're a casual marketeer, you should bear this in mind: bid, store and craft during the week day, sell on weekends. Prices also tend to be higher.

Tonight, I had about 90 minutes of time after work and before dinner, so instead of AE, I decided to do an "experiment". Since my market slots were full of IOs that were for sale and bids on recipes or salvage, I decided to go and garner up some reward merits and try to get some of those rare and sometimes very expensive pool C or taskforce reward recipes. To give myself a chance for 2 rolls, I went to Ouroboros and chose two story arcs: The Freakshow War by Neal Kendrick (worth 33 merits) and The Redemption of Alexander by Ashwin Lannister (worth 7 merits).

I chose these because I can do the Freakshow arc in about 50 minutes and the Alexander arc in about 20. I finished the two arcs in about an hour and change, and promptly rolled two random level 35-39 recipes (20 merits = 1 random roll).

Here's what I got:



One very good roll, the Obliteration; one that is rather mediocre, the Positron Blast.

I knew that by rolling the Obliteration, I was going to break the 200M mark. I was hoping to get 30M for it and maybe have a couple of others sell too. This was what happened...



Better than I had hoped.

Now you may have noticed that there are a number of other IOs that are showing up on my screens that I haven't talked about much. The sharp eyed among you will have noticed the sale of Efficacy Adaptors, Eradications, Adjusted Targeting, Steadfast Protections and Reactive Armors. Those are a partial list of some of the recipes that I have bid on for cheap, crafted and then listed for sale.

While I won't go into minute detail about what price points I used and exactly how I acquired these recipes (largely because I think I'd bore you), I will talk about how I decide to go after certain recipes.

As I talk about in my guide, I look for IOs which have a large discrepency between the price of the recipe and the price of the finished IO. However, since I'm trying to maximize profit in a short amount of time, I also use other criteria. In particular, I look at sets which have beneficial bonuses for just two slots. Steadfast Protection is a great example of that, offering a very nice recovery bonus for two slots. I figure that since many players desire the Steadfast Res/Def IO, many will also buy a Res/End IO (which sells for far less) as a companion IO.

The other criteria I use is that I often target the second best IO in a set. I've purposely bought up the Eradication Acc/Dmg/Rech and passed up its much more expensive quad aspect sibling (Acc/Dmg/Rech/End). The quad will sell for about 80-85M crafted, the triple about a quarter of that. However, even quad recipes are expensive and rare, while the triple recipes can be had for less than 1M. If I buy the recipe for a million, pay the buy-it-nao price for the salvage (around 4M), I'll still eke out well over 12M profit after subtracting marketing fees.

The other IOs I've bought follow the same two criteria. I bought the Adjusted Targeting ToHit/Rech/End Rex, largely because many players covet the double aspect ToHit/Rech piece highly. I've bought the Efficacy Adaptor End Mod single because many players also buy the other pieces of the set, since just 2 of those give a nice set bonus for hitpoints.

It's this thought process that helps me narrow down the choices among the possible profit opportunities available.

Finally, while I'm touched that many of think I will make it to the billions, please remember that the sales results you're seeing are the result of weekend market activity. I know for certain sales volume will slow significantly in the next couple of days, picking up again around Thursday. You should definitely factor that in your calculations. Further, I'm at a point where the bottleneck in my ability to generate profit is the number of slots I happen to have. To alleviate this bottleneck, I may have to go after riskier, bigger game...

I have to say, I know a little about the market and have only recently begun to understand enough to pull in about 150-200 mill per week per toon. Thank you for this thread. It is giving me some much needed insight into working the market even better than I already do.

Today's guess: 1,062,000,000

I'm going to jump in with a guess of 1.15 Billion. You're almost a quarter of the way there with 5 weekdays to go. I think you can do it.

My list of "solid mid-list sellers" has no overlap with yours. Huh.

Day 3 - Starting inf: 227,963,856, Current Inf: 247,489,464

Just a quick update before heading to work this morning. A few IOs sold overnight and my current influence total is just shy of 250M. Slots are full again with IOs to sell and I have a little bit of influence from a clear of the AE farm I've been using (which also generated around 1200 tickets).

I'll throw out a random guess of 580 million. I've recently begun my own experiment as well. I'm all for folks finding new ways to have fun and raise influence/infamy. Good show!

I have to admit I don't even worry about influence/infamy any more.

Between MA tickets and the easy availability of so many merits the opportunities are overwhelming. Plus the email of inf now.

I enjoy threads like this because of the effort others are willing to make to do these things including screenshots and posting about it. I am far too lazy to bother trying to show how easy it is anymore.

This thread is awesome, and I've already learned a bunch. Thanks!

LOL, don't you guys know it's soooooo harrrd to make inf in this game!!!!

/sarcams off.

Good job Fury.

Nice work! I'll guess 838M for now.

My guess is "lots".

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

I'll guess 1,297,000,000.

Amazing what people can make on this game if they just pay attention, and have a bit of patience.

Let's see... I put in 444M, 888M, so I'll double that for my Day 3 (and last)
bid. The fun part now will be seeing where you get over the next 4 days.

So, my Day 3 bid is 1,776,000,000 (1.776 Billion).

Fun Stuff.

Cheers,
4

I'll go with 1,750,000,000.

I am going to guess 703 million

guess for day 3: 512,000,000 (512M)

My guess is 724million